Night Bus Painting

It usually amazes me how things look different at night. This picture began when I took a trip to the beach on the bus at night. I wanted to get a good look at night time reflections. It was before digital cameras. I had a camera that could take pictures at night, but it did not have an automatic correction for focus or movement. I think the strange and blurry pictures that resulted were a good starting point for creating night pictures. In the case of this specific picture, there were two women who sat in the front seat across from the driver, and behind them was a man who was a bit 'spacy'. He kept asking for directions when to get off, but he wanted to go to another town. In translating my fuzzy camera shots into the a comprehensible picture, I had to decide what to reveal and what to hide. Both the darkness and the light made it difficult to see objects. Visually, we were all like the guy with the whiskey bottle in his bag, who thought he knew where he was going. None of us could really see where we were headed. This is a dark, but colorful picture. Ostensibly it is about a bus ride, but the thing that really interested me was the subject of sight and the interpretation of what we see.